WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today at noon, President Trump will sign the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act into law following its passage through the House and Senate — with overwhelming bipartisan support. The Consumer Choice Center (CCC) applauds this step toward addressing America’s housing shortage, which has priced millions of families out of homeownership and driven consumer frustration to record highs.
The legislation, co-sponsored by Sens. Tim Scott (R-SC) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), is the largest housing affordability package passed by Congress in decades. ROAD focuses on removing regulatory barriers that have kept housing supply artificially low while demand continues to surge — as of today, the United States is currently short an estimated 4 million or more housing units.
“For decades, local governments have made it expensive, complicated, and legally fraught to build new homes,” said Stephen Kent of the Consumer Choice Center. “At the heart of America’s housing crunch is too much rulemaking that says ‘No’ and not nearly enough that says ‘Yes.’ This bill finally starts to flip that equation. It’s not a perfect piece of legislation — and it can’t do anything to control interest rates or city councils at odds with development, but it does make the regulatory environment less grueling for homebuilders by providing grants for preapproved housing designs and lessening the environmental review process for certain projects.”
The ROAD to Housing Act includes several provisions that the Consumer Choice Center has championed (RealClearPolitics)(Washington Examiner) as critical to expanding consumer choice in the housing market:
- Streamlined environmental reviews for federally assisted housing projects, reducing years of bureaucratic delay that have added hundreds of thousands of dollars to construction costs.
- Tying Community Development Block Grant funding to actual housing production, ending the practice of communities collecting federal dollars while blocking new construction.
- A $200 million annual Innovation Fund rewarding localities that reform zoning to allow more homes per acre — the kind of incentive-based approach that respects federalism while addressing the NIMBYism strangling housing supply.
- Elimination of the permanent chassis requirement for manufactured homes, removing a 50-year-old regulation that inflates costs by up to $10,000 per unit for a housing type relied upon by 8.4 million Americans.
- Programs to convert vacant commercial buildings into housing and fast-track accessory dwelling unit approvals, unlocking underused urban land.
Kent added: “The shortage of available homes is driving political discontent that cascades into every part of American life. Young families who give up on homeownership don’t just lose a house — research shows they lose faith in the value of hard work itself. That’s why this legislation matters beyond the policy details. Congress has finally given the country a supply-side answer to a supply-side problem, and the White House was right to complement it by slashing tariffs on steel, aluminum, and copper that were adding nearly $11,000 to the cost of every new home. Consumers are going to benefit.”
The Consumer Choice Center acknowledges that the bill’s restrictions on large institutional investors owning more than 350 single-family homes remain a concern. Institutional investors hold less than 1% of single-family homes nationally, and restricting which legal entities can buy, own, or sell property raises constitutional questions and may reduce the flow of capital into housing rehabilitation. However, the supply-side reforms in this bill represent the most significant pro-consumer housing policy in a generation, and the CCC urges swift implementation.
“There is no more time to be wasted, and no more patience left among Americans for inaction on housing,” Kent concluded. “Let’s start building.”
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About the Consumer Choice Center
The Consumer Choice Center is an independent, nonpartisan consumer advocacy group championing the benefits of freedom of choice, innovation, and abundance in everyday life for consumers in over 100 countries. We closely monitor regulatory trends in Brussels, Washington, Ottawa, Brasilia, London, Geneva, and more.
